Darrow Miller Interview

One of the best books I've read this year is LifeWork: A Biblical Theology for What you Do Everyday by Darrow Miller. I've also enjoyed getting to know Darrow Miller a little bit through conversation over email and the phone. Because I want all of you to read LifeWork and become familiar with Darrow Miller, I'm posting this interview with Darrow.Read the interview, then read the book. Also, check out the Monday Church website which is staked with helpful resources related to the message of LifeWork.1. Darrow, how would you summarize the message of LifeWork in a paragraph?For too many years much of the church has been functioning from a dualistic paradigm -  the spiritual is separated from the secular and is deemed higher. This dualism is not Biblical;  it is an ancient Greek mindset. It affects every area of life including how one answers the questions: What is the church? What is the role of the church in society? What is the gospel? What does it mean to be a Christian? And etc. In the realm of work, ecclesiastical calling (being a pastor, evangelist, church planter, or a cross-cultural missionary) is viewed as a higher calling. Being an artist, engineer, farmer, lawyer, or auto mechanic are seen as secular and thus a lower calling. This flawed understanding has effectively disengaged the church from culture. We no longer function from a theology of vocation, nor do we connect our work to the advancement of the Kingdom of God. We are Christians on Sundays but not Monday Christians.  The book is a call to connect our life and work to the coming of God’s Kingdom.2. What do you hope happens as a result of people reading LifeWork?There are three main hopes for the book. First, I hope that people who are working among the poor would understand the Biblical framework of work and will begin to disciple the people they are working with to see that work is part of human dignity. Most cultures that are poor believe that work is a curse. Having worked for 27 years for an international relief and development organization, I have come to see that physical poverty is a direct result of the lie that work is a curse. Second, I hope the book will help Christians who are working in the home, marketplace or public square  see that their work is important and that Christ wants to advance his Kingdom through their work. I want to break down this unbiblical dichotomy. Third, I want to challenge pastors to begin to teach again on a theology of vocation. The people who congregate on Sunday spend most of their adult life and a larger part of their waking hours at work. And yet there is so little encouragement from the pulpit to help the congregation understand the vital role their work plays in the advancement of the Kingdom.3. Why should pastors read LifeWork? How can pastors help spread the message of LifeWork in their churches?They need to read the book and begin to develop a series of sermons from the book. There should be a time each year when pastors teach on the theology of vocation. Sunday school classes and Bible studies can be started around vocational themes to help prepare Christians in their congregations to think Biblically in terms of their work. Too often Christians think like the world thinks in terms of their vocation. This is one reason the United States is in such moral bankruptcy in the market place and public square. There could be commission ceremonies for vocational workers after they have explored how to apply Biblical principle to their vocations. Pastors could band together with other pastors to begin a “church in the city” where Christian leaders will work together to begin to impact the city and their state. These could be modeled after the Clapham Sect in England that the Lord used to bring and end to slavery in the British empire.4. What motivated you to write LifeWork?The Bible is true to the reality that God has made. The Biblical worldview is the “reference point” to which all of life is oriented, including work. When our work is defined in terms of a materialistic reference point, life unravels. My desire is to help Christians around the world to understand the need to reference their work to the Biblical narrative.5.  Darrow, tell us more about yourself: your background, the work you're doing now, what you've written, etc. I have been the husband of the bride of my youth, Marilyn, for 44 years. We have four children and eleven grand children and counting. Marilyn and I live in a log home in the Coconino Forest where I spend half of my time writing and corresponding with young Christians from around the world. I came to know Christ when I was thirteen years old and an ex-convict named Cass Shrive shared the gospel with me. I always mention his name in sharing my testimony as I only knew Cass one day in my life and am always hoping someone  will know him to help reconnect us. The two most important experiences in my life were a trip to Mexico City as a college student. It was there that I saw poverty for the first time and my heart was broken for the plight of the poor. The second event occurred in my mid-twenties when Marilyn and I studied at L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland under the late Francis Schaeffer. It was there that I understood that I had a “born again “heart but an unregenerate mind. Having grown up in America, I thought like an atheistic materialist and needed to be “born again, again” -  to begin to think like a Christian.For a few years I was a student pastor at Northern Arizona University and then a pastor of a church in Denver Colorado. Then God called me to work at Food for the Hungry an international relief and development organization, of Christian motivation, that works among the poor in about 30 developing countries. It was at this time that my broken heart for the poor and my understanding of the power of ideas and the importance of the Biblical worldview came together. As I began traveling around the world, witnessing immense poverty, I realized that the billions of dollars in international aid made very little difference. In fact, too often the aid created dependency and thus greater poverty.It was then that I realized that the root of poverty was not lack of resources, but it was lack of truth in the culture. Poverty was rooted in lies, in faulty paradigms. In many of the poorest communities in the world people are fatalistic – they think they are poor and there is nothing that they can do about it; they see women as inferior to men, work  as a curse, the universe as capricious – leads to a culture of corruption,  and etc. In order to see people lifted out of poverty they needed to come to operated in the frame of reality that God had made. History is not something that happens to you, it is something you created. Women are not the property of men, they are made in the image of God and are the equals of men. Work is not a curse, it is part of our dignity. The universe is not capricious, it is orderly. Fools deny this order. The wise discover this order and walk in its frame. The concept of development that I first learned at FH was  “need based development” NBD, where well intentioned people go into a community do an needs survey and then seek to supply the needs of the community from outside resources. Over the years I concluded that this approach did little to help people  out of poverty. Then we began to understand a new (or rather ancient) concept, “asset based development” – ABD. This concept of development helps people see and access the assets they have in their own lives and communities and begin to use them for their own development.A number of things have been born out of these insights. The first has been a partnership between FH and another non-profit organization, Harvest Foundation. This partnership has become known as the Disciple Nations Alliance www.disciplenations.org and is working organically with people in 60-70 countries.  Our primary focus is on envisioning and equipping local churches to engage in the development of their own communities with their own resources. A number of books have come from the things we have learned. Discipling Nations: The Power of Truth to Transform Cultures was published in 1997. The Kingdom Lifestyle Series, written with Scott Allen and Bob Moffitt, was published in 2005. Nurturing the Nations: Reclaiming the Dignity of Women to Build Healthy Cultures was published in 2007. LifeWork: A Biblical Theology for What You Do Every Day was published in 2009. In addition, Dr. Bob Moffitt, the President of Harvest Foundation and co-founder of DNA has written If Jesus Were Mayor: How Your Local Church Can Transform Your Community.